Customer Reviews

McAfee Internet Security 3User 2010 [Old Version]

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

With Bit Defender and Kaperski, McAfee rates in the top 3 on many internet security reviews (#2). Here are my 10 cents worth after using all 3 of the above. Bit Defender has an excellent firewall but during a full scan, it tends to slow down the computer quite a bit. Of the 3, Kaperski has the fastest scan. Both Mc and Ski have very good firewall. But only Mc's firewall was certified by ICSA labs in 2009. Of the 3, I found Mc's Antivirus to be superior to the other 2 ( a solid A minus - B+ for the others). It was particularly well suited in detecting malicious items from foreign websites. The user interface in Mc's was more friendly than the other 2. Although ski's is only slightly just a notch behind. Mc's uses simple to understand traffic lights. Red: warning do not click into the website. Yellow: use caution. Green: OK! What could be more simple. In terms of price Mc's is stuck between the two.
Therefore here is the verdict: Bit defender - Excellent Firewall and above average AntiVirus. Slow scan and excellent price. Kaperski: very good firewall and Antivirus. Fastest Scan. It does everything very well, but does not excel in one particular area. Downside: a little pricey. Reviewer's choice: McAfee. A very good firewall and excellent Antivirus. Scan speed C+. Full of features and user friendly (a 7 year old could understand their color code). McAfee has set the standard for your complete computer protection. It's a no brainer.

I purchased this on a goldbox deal and installed it on two computers in the last week.

As the title says: it is what it is.

It's a "protection package" that you basically buy for the antivirus . . . the rest is basically social engineering.

Firewall & "Internet Protection" is subjective -- if you only surf and e-mail, it's helpful, but otherwise it blocks ports, which you could be using for one protocol or another. Adding a firewall to an average person's machine is terribly frustrating if a port needs to be opened. Worse, if they need support to talk them through doing so, if the software isn't VERY intuitive it can add to this experience. I've yet to encounter "home" software that is good at this.

Antivirus - it's one of the leading brands; not much to expect, not hard to meet the expectation.

Backup & Restore - honestly, there's nothing better than making your own backups. Lots of good software exists to automatically back up your software, but I wouldn't purchase this package for this particular reason.

Web Filter - again, there are better and there are worse. If you're REALLY concerned about the parental filtering, you need to get a dedicated service that is proactive about updates, not an afterthought on a package. Some browsers have features like this built-in, but I've yet to find one that didn't have false positives (as I don't visit sites with malware).

Updates . . . if you just "fix" security issues, it may enable MS updates. This led me on a 2-hour reinstall of drivers . . . but that's a Microsoft issue, not necessarily this software. You should keep your Windows updated, but you need to set aside time to do updates and MAKE SURE things work afterwards . . . it's just a peril of Windows.

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Update - I have to, unfortunately, send this to the "do not buy" list.

On my mother's work computer, my father was (reluctantly) trying to catch up on e-mails and clicked on a "forwarded" message URL which brought him to the most convincing scareware site I'd ever seen. It did an install of an "antivirus" program which totally and utterly rendered McAfee useless without so much as a peep from the real antivirus. The result was a set of self-downloading viruses and trojans that I was only able to exercise through safe-mode (disable EVERYTHING that starts up) then use of Panda online, Symantec online (and something else I can't remember). Each removed malware & viruses that the others managed to leave behind.

After I'd corrected those issues, McAfee was monopolizing the processor and memory starting on login and had to be uninstalled.

It's a shame that people have to go through this - I had a hard time and know (relatively speaking) what I'm doing. Panda and Norton (in my experience) may not have prevented you from clicking on something that scares you into installing it, but they would have prevented some of the additional infections and at least notified you of the problem. McAfee was easily circumvented.

Good luck folks.

I seriously cannot remember the last time I depended on McAfee products to keep my PC secure. I have used Norton Internet Security exclusively the last three years, but I needed more licenses than I already had. I ordered a 3-user license of McAfee Internet Security 2010 and now remember why I stopped using McAfee several years ago.

PROS:
- Low impact on system performance
- Well organized interface
- Lots of features
- Inexpensive compared to competitors

CONS:
- Poor threat database
- False positives
- Disabling e-mail scanning causes nagging prompts
- Historically does not catch insidious files as effectively as competition
- Only 30 days of free support

The install was quick, but not as quick as Norton Internet Security 2010 or Kaspersky Internet Security 2010. After the install, I was not required to reboot. It did not prompt me to perform a full system scan, as I feel it should. I manually ran the scan and it finished in under an hour. I did not expect to see anything unusual, but in fact, I did.

VIRUS/MALWARE DETECTION
Historically speaking, MIS has performed below average at detecting viruses and malware, compared to the competitors. Their database of threats is usually significantly smaller than those of Norton and Kaspersky. I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to test this feature without giving myself a virus, but after my first full system scan, McAfee apparently caught a virus! I was shocked. I had NIS2010 and KIS2010 on my system just before installing MIS2010 and so you can imagine my amazement. The file it caught as a virus was WinDVD 2010, windvd.exe. Uh, no. The reason my previous 2 security programs didn't catch it was because it is NOT a virus. Just to be sure, I checked the file with the online virus scanners of Kaspersky and ESET (Nod32) and they both cleared it as well.

PERFORMANCE
I was actually quite surprised that the impact to my system from MIS2010 was fairly minimal. It was about the same as Kaspersky, as far as I could tell, but still impacted my web browsing more than Norton.

USER INTERFACE
The interface has two versions, Basic and Advanced. The Basic interface is generally good and allows quick access to updates and scanning.

MISC
Like most security suites, McAfee also includes parental controls and spam filtering. I've read that they are pretty decent, but I do not use them and prefer to turn them off or not have them at all. I also don't have an e-mail client on my computer so I choose to turn off e-mail scanning but McAfee continued to nag me that my system was not secure because I'd turned it off. I should be able to choose to not use a feature without being warned by nagging messages. I reluctantly turned it back on so I could tell if the big red X on my system tray icon meant it was a real threat and not that I'd turned off e-mail scanning.

MIS2010 also includes a file shredder, network map, web site safety ratings, and identity protection.

SUPPORT
The quality of software support is often hit or miss, but with McAfee, you'll only have 30 days to hit, or miss.

SUMMARY
McAfee Internet Security 2010 is underwhelming in nearly all tasks that matter. I expect at the basic level, that my security suite will keep my PC secure, accurately. Then I hope for good performance, ease of use, and good bonus features, all supported by decent technical support. It does not stack up well against Norton or Kaspersky in any area. I would personally rather use Microsoft's free Security Essentials, which has been rated very good, before I trust MIS2010 on my system. I strongly discourage any user from using it, even if it's offered at no charge.

*****McAfee updated this product on April 17 2010, completely changing the interface and eliminating the Quick Clean feature. The new interface is designed to be cool rather than to be user-friendly. My system now runs much slower. Another irritating feature was the default setting for internet access: it allowed the computer to connect to the internet but not to receive any information from it! One had to find the default and change the setting. I'm sure there is some rationale for this, but it was an unpleasant experience and when I called McAfee they wanted to charge my credit card before even connecting me to technical support.

The new spam feature seems very fierce. I'm not getting even a single message that I would characterize as spam. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the "Balanced" setting is not screening out emails that I want. I'm not able to view a listing of the excluded messages to check.

Navigational assistance to deal with the new interface is minimal. McAfee had some kind of video about the new product but their own default internet setting prevented me from viewing it!

The remainder of this review concerns the product as it was in November 2009. At that point I gave it a five star rating. Possibly the new product deserves more than 3 stars, but the introduction of the update was so ham-handed and burned up so much time that McAfee will have to re-earn my trust.*****

Continuous vigilance is the price of freedom; so a good internet security program is absolutely essential in order to enjoy the benefits of the internet. The computer that all my Amazon reviews have been composed on has long been protected by McAfee. Like many other users, I felt I could rely on it. I liked the idea of the anti-virus software starting up immediately the computer was turned on and running in the background--but unobtrusively please!

Until I upgraded to McAfee Internet Security 2010, I was starting to feel that my security system got more use out of my computer than I did. Scans and pop-ups and security update installations were taking a lot of computer resources and taking a lot of fun out of using my computer. I'm a computer user rather than a computer whiz-kid. Email is my main resource for keeping in touch with friends and family close to my heart but geographically distant. Access to the internet means I can live in a small town but have access to world-class culture and shopping. All this is constrained by slow load times and scans that seemed to block my access as badly as would a virus.

With the update, the security system is once again in the background. As I have typed this short review, McAfee has updated its definitions, notified me of its new installations and now is quietly scanning my system. I've not had any freezes, lock-ups or snags despite the limited capacity of my five year old computer and my dial-up ISP. That's the true test of new software: can it make an old system secure AND snappy? Yes, my computer is zipped up secure and zips along!

While I could go on about the positives of this package, I'll stop right there and tell you that there is a better option for antivirus software out there right now that is absolutely free. Microsoft Security Essentials is the program I use for all of my Windows based computers. As long as you have a valid copy of Windows, you can download this program from Microsoft for free, and it has garnered positive reviews from the majority of its users so far. In my opinion, it will shortly take over McAfee and Norton as the most widely used antivirus and internet security program on the market.

McAfee offers a solid virus protection software, and this updated version runs faster than the previous version. It still tends to bog down my computer when it's updating software (which it does fairly often).

I like the fact that it has a built in SiteAdvisor, which tells me whether a site is safe to visit and use. So often when you do searches, you'll end up on a website that is not safe or tends to send a lot of spam e-mails, and McAfee will warn you.

My computer has stayed mostly virus free, although like any virus software, this isn't perfect. I've had a few minor things slip through to be caught later through a full virus scan.

I would recommend this as a solid but not perfect virus software.

Virus scan is still the core of the McAfee Internet Security suite. Unfortunately, it's a little hard to rate the quality of the virus scan itself without conducting a lot of rigorous testing. The lab reports that I have seen rate it very highly. Over the last 15 years, I've used virus scanners from McAfee, Symantec, and AVG. For any given threat, one may get updated quicker than another, but they all seem to have about the same degree of effectiveness.

The other features of the product, while nice, come off as something of an afterthought. Internet Security adds parental controls, phishing detection, document shredding (overwrites deleted files' data with random characters to prevent recovery), and spam filtering. I did not get a chance to use the spam filtering since I use a hosted mail account at home.

The parental controls were especially weak. The copy of Norton 2006 which this replaced had much more granular controls over which account could go to what sites. The built-in parental controls on OSX exceed even that - allowing specific control of what applications an account is allowed to run and which email addresses they can communicate with. Providers of Windows security software really need to bring their products up to speed with what Apple provides out of the box.

The install process took approximately half an hour. Halfway through, it presented a warning that it could not proceed with the install, but then installed anyway. It also required the removal of Spybot Search & Destroy - a high quality free antispyware program which I have found to be a useful supplement to commercial security software.

This product seems to do the job well enough, but next time I upgrade I will probably go back to the Symantec product line. On the positive side, the price is very reasonable for a 3 PC license.

Like others, I had problems when I tried to unistall my old mcafee. I ran the uninstall program but Mcafee kept disabling itself saying mcafee had expired. I kept reinstalling and adding my new product key but still got the error message. After researching online, I found out I had to uninstall the old mcafee version, reboot, download and run MCPR.exe and reboot. It took me an entire afternoon - Very frustrating.

Now it's all installed and I'm running the firewall in stealth mode. I'm not sure if it's really stealth, but it sounds cool - like the jet. So far it hasn't slowed things down much, so that's good news.

I thought I would try using the Network feature - where you run from one pc to another in your home typing in the passwords so the pc's on your network will know and trust each other. So now my pc's "know" each other but I guess they don't "like" each other, because they lock up now. Hmmmmm, now I have to figure out how to remove the Network feature.

In all fairness I think Mcafee does a decent job of protecting my pc. I have tried running the free anti virus apps but my pc slowed to a crawl. I suppose next year I will buy mcafee again, I must be a glutton for punishment. I wonder what new headaches -- er, I mean features -- the new version will have. ;-}

Pros:
Doesn't slow my pc down as much as others I've used
Does a decent job of protecting
Has a nice firewall
Menus are easy to use
Lot's of fixes online, since it's a popular software company
Lot's of configurable options

Cons
They want you to pay to renew the licenses, licenses only lasts a year
Can be difficult to add a new product key - it doesn't always recognize it (run mcpr.exe to remove the old licenses)
Network feature can be a problem if it causes your pc's to lock up like mine - I don't recommend installing it
Doesn't catch everything (none do) so I recommend to also run something like Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware

What a nightmare with McAfee. Wasted a week's time only to find they have not yet resolved compatibility Issues with Windows 7 64 Bit. No acknowledgement of problem on web site, you have to pay to talk to tech support, not until I reached the Platinum level of support did I get straight answers. One technician suggested I stop using my computer until they resolved the problem; dates went from July 5th to latter in July. Finally they offered me a refund. I have yet to receive it after 3-4 weeks. This company has no business integrity!

I just bought this in April & used the backup feature to do a monthly full back up to an outside drive, and a daily incremental backup. Yesterday the McAfee automatically "updated" the system and removed the back-up and restore function without warning. I have Windows xp not Windows 7, which does have a backup utility. McAfee says I can use their free 1GB online backup but that is totally inadequate. I feel like they have ripped me off totally, and will never use McAfee again.